Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Decisions...decisions

I can't make them. I have a couple that need tending, and like my back garden, I am full of intentions and plans and exciting little crops of goodness; the weeds and erratic nature of the environment is weighing down hope for clear path making.

I had an interesting experience happen to me on the way to yoga on Sunday night. It was one of those moments where you aren't quite sure how to act, and you are afraid that your gut feeling might be misplaced or just down right Conservative.

I had taken my mac to the shop and actually had it fixed FOR FREE, by a wonderfully quiet and knowledgeable man at PCUSED (a great little shop on Bathurst and Dupont), and decided to go straight to yoga following the rebirth of my laptop. Good idea - get there a bit early, maybe do some more cardio (because the two hours in the morning wasn't enough). However, good intentions...blah blah...you know the idiom. Taste of Little Italy was robbing me of a quick path down College and I had to trudge (and it did, given the heat and hoards of people, feel like trudging) my way down about 10 blocks before getting to the YMCA locker room. But! I still had a few moments to spare before yoga. Rather than jumping on the elliptical, I ran across the street for a soy milk - Starbucks...why do you charge me 3 50 for warm soya milk - and Lyndsay...why do you pay for it? Anyhow, as I reached for the door I was cut off by a man who I had seen in the coffee shop on numerous occasions - yelling, screaming and causing general raucous. It was clear that he had mental illness of some variety. No problem. However, on this hot Sunday afternoon, the fellow stepped in front of me and blocked my entrance to my soya milk. I tried to dodge around him, no luck. I asked him to move, no luck - he kept staring at me accusingly. I think I was invading his sanctuary. Fair enough. But I wanted a drink. I asked him a couple more times to move, in a fairly pleasant manner, and than....than he lashed out and tried to punch me! Whoah. Not expecting that. I got a little nervous, backed off and waited for him to head off. Afterwards I went inside and spoke to the manager who informed me that they were trying to get him off their property but were having difficulty.

My thoughts are this: If he had hit me - he would have been in a lot of trouble. If I had been someone else and he had hit me, he might have put himself in danger. Shouldn't he be removed from the streets because he is a danger to himself and to others? But this is the ugly blurry line that I can't decide is making me a big asshole or not........When is someone a danger? When does it become an issue of social responsibility? Does everyone have the right to freedom even if it means that they are potentially setting themselves up for harm? And if they do not have the capacity to understand that potential who gets to decide this, and than of course the larger answer - who is given the responsibility to police this?Of course there are obvious cases that need little moral or ethical stomach knots in order to come to a clear answer - if someone is in a state of mental understanding whereby they feel it acceptable to punch, kick, bite, try to have sex etc, every single person who comes their way. That doesn't give me as much mental trauma to come up with the thought that they need intensive and special treatment. But, what if, it is just the odd attack of the yoga soy seeking girl at the local coffee shop? BUT - what if that yoga girl did not have her chakra's lined up and was a tough cookie who hit back and knocked any offending fist slinging person out? What then? The initial fist slinger is putting themselves in the way of peril and yet they are either not aware or not caring....what do we do??? Hmmmm.....I just will have to go and try and fight my way to some more soya milk to come up with an answer.

Sharing that didn't help me in my road to decision making, but it did waste some time. Good.